27/07/2019 Getting Started with Kubernetes Using Minikube - Linux Academy Blog

Getting Started with

Kubernetes Using Minikube
Posted by Keith
(https://linuxacademy.com/blog/author/keith/), March 18, 2019

Working in technology, whether that be software development, DevOps, or system administration,

you’ve undoubtedly heard of Kubernetes (https://linuxacademy.com/blog/cloud/what-is-
kubernetes/?
utm_source=website&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=2019_kubernetesbasics). It’s one of
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the fastest growing pieces of technology that I’ve ever seen and that’s for good reason. As a
powerful tool, Kubernetes does have quite a learning curve. If you’re ready to start learning it, I
think the best way is to use Minikube (https://github.com/kubernetes/minikube) to run a
Kubernetes cluster locally. In this post, we’ll take a look at how Minikube works and how we can use
it to experiment with the concepts of Kubernetes.

What is Minikube?
Minikube is a tool developed by the Kubernetes team to allow you to spin up a full Kubernetes
cluster on your workstation within a VM. This approach is a lot more cost effective than spinning up
multiple servers in your cloud provider of choice, wiring them together, and then learning the
basics of Kubernetes. Setting up a Kubernetes cluster from scratch can be quite the hurdle and
would definitely stop many people from learning Kubernetes before ever getting to know the tool
itself. This is the problem that Minikube solves.

Installing Minikube
To install Minikube, we need to make sure that we already have a hypervisor installed on our
system so that we can run VMs. This does mean that we can’t work with Minikube from within a VM
because nesting VMs is an issue. For most people, VirtualBox
(https://www.virtualbox.org/wiki/Downloads) is a great, free hypervisor that you can install to use
with Minikube.

Once you have a hypervisor installed, you’re ready to install Minikube. I’m going to assume that
you’re using a Unix based workstation, but it is entirely possible to use Minikube from Windows.
The easiest way to install Minikube is by following the official installation documentation
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(https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/tools/install-minikube/#install-minikube). On the macOS

machine that I’m going to use,I will download the latest static binary, make it executable, and put it
into my $PATH:

$ curl -Lo minikube https://storage.googleapis.com/minikube/releases/latest/minikube-darw

in-amd64 && \
chmod +x minikube && \
mv minikube /usr/local/bin/

Now I have access to the minikube CLI. The last thing that we’ll need to install is the Kubernetes CLI:
kubectl. Our approach to installing kubectl will be very similar to how we installed minikube. You

can look at the official documentation (https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/tools/install-

kubectl/#install-kubectl-binary-using-curl) to see what you will modify if you’re using Linux or
Windows:

$ curl -LO https://storage.googleapis.com/kubernetes-release/release/$(curl -s https://st

orage.googleapis.com/kubernetes-release/release/stable.txt)/bin/darwin/amd64/kubectl && \
chmod +x kubectl && \
mv kubectl /usr/local/bin/

Now we have all of the tools that we need to start working with Kubernetes locally.

Starting Our Kubernetes Cluster

Starting our Kubernetes cluster couldn’t be much (if any) simpler than what Minikube has made it.
To get our cluster running, we simply need to run minikube start.

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Note: This may take a little while.

$ minikube start
minikube v0.34.1 on darwin (amd64)
Creating virtualbox VM (CPUs=2, Memory=2048MB, Disk=20000MB) ...
Downloading Minikube ISO ...
184.30 MB / 184.30 MB [============================================] 100.00% 0s
"minikube" IP address is 192.168.99.100
Configuring Docker as the container runtime ...
Preparing Kubernetes environment ...
Downloading kubeadm v1.13.3
Downloading kubelet v1.13.3
Pulling images required by Kubernetes v1.13.3 ...
Launching Kubernetes v1.13.3 using kubeadm ...
Configuring cluster permissions ...
Verifying component health .....
kubectl is now configured to use "minikube"
Done! Thank you for using minikube!

It took quite a few steps to get our Kubernetes cluster up and running, but I want to call your
attention to the second to last one:

kubectl is now configured to use "minikube"

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The kubectl tool can be used to connect with multiple clusters and the cluster that Minikube
created is just like any other cluster. Running minikube start not only created our cluster, but it
also took the time to set the configuration values necessary for our kubectl commands to interact
with that cluster.

Now we’re ready to start using Kubernetes.

A Brief Overview of Kubernetes Terms

When first starting out with Kubernetes, there are going to be quite a few terms that get thrown
around that don’t show up elsewhere. Let’s break down some of the terms so that we have a
shared vocabulary for talking about Kubernetes:

Pod: Pods are the atomic unit when working with Kubernetes. A pod consists of one or more
containers and they’ll all be deployed on the same host. Pod definitions also include
specifications for required resources and other things like volumes.
Deployment: A deployment is a declarative specification for the desired end state of pods
that need to be deployed together. Deployments are responsible for managing pods and the
most common way that we go about creating pods.
Service: A service declares how pods can be accessed. Conceptually, a service is similar to a
reverse proxy for pods.

With these terms defined, we can create our first pod, deployment, and service.

Our First Deployment

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For the remainder of this tutorial, we’ll use the kubectl utility to create and work with Kubernetes
objects. While pods are the smallest building block used for working with Kubernetes, we don’t
often create them directly. A more common way to create a pod is to define and create a
deployment. Let’s create a deployment that will start up an Nginx container. The best way to build
things with Kubernetes is to use the declarative YAML
(https://linuxacademy.com/blog/devops/learn-the-yaml-basics/?
utm_source=website&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=2019_kubernetesbasics) approach.
For our deployment, let’s create a file called webserver-deployment.yml:

webserver-deployment.yml

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apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
name: webserver-deployment
labels:
app: webserver
spec:
replicas: 1
selector:
matchLabels:
app: webserver
template:
metadata:
labels:
app: webserver
spec:
containers:
- name: nginx
image: "nginx:1.15"
ports:
- containerPort: 80

There’s quite a bit going on in this file that’s just boilerplate, but the important details are the api,
kind, spec.replicas, and spec.template.spec.containers. By specifying the containers section,

we’re effectively creating the pod. The syntax within the containers section is similar to how you’d
define a service in a Docker Compose file.

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For creating and updating almost anything in Kubernetes, we can use the kubectl apply -f
command, passing in the file that defines the desired state. Let’s create our deployment doing
this:

$ kubectl apply -f webserver-deployment.yml

deployment.apps/webserver-deployment created

Now we have a deployment called webserver-deployment. We can see all of the deployments that
we have by using the kubectl get command, passing in the type of object that we’d like to see. To
see deployments, we’ll run this command:

$ kubectl get deployments

NAME READY UP-TO-DATE AVAILABLE AGE
webserver-deployment 1/1 1 1 91s

The deployment manages our pod. We can see what pods exist by using kubectl get pods:

$ kubectl get pods

NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
webserver-deployment-5558c6f6f6-v9rq2 1/1 Running 0 4m13s

A beautiful aspect of Kubernetes’ declarative nature is that we can change our webserver-
deployment.yml to require more than one replica of our container and run the same command that

we used to originally deploy. Change the replicas: 1 line to replicas: 3 within the webserver-
deployment.yml file.

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Deploying this won’t show a lot of information, but digging deeper, we’ll see that 2 new containers
were created:

$ kubectl apply -f webserver-deployment.yml

deployment.apps/webserver-deployment configured
$ kubectl get pods
NAME READY STATUS RESTARTS AGE
webserver-deployment-5558c6f6f6-glpm4 1/1 Running 0 4m33s
webserver-deployment-5558c6f6f6-pwbdg 1/1 Running 0 41s
webserver-deployment-5558c6f6f6-vnnhr 1/1 Running 0 41s

Notice that Kubernetes didn’t bother removing the original pod; it determined the difference
between the current state and the desired state and took the minimum number of actions
required to achieve that desired state.

Making Our Pod Accessible Using a Service

The last thing that we’re going to do is set up a “service” to expose our web server deployment and
pods so that we can access them from our web browser. It is possible to set up a service using the
YAML syntax, but we can also use an imperative approach by using the kubectl expose command.
Let’s expose our deployment behind a load-balancing service:

$ kubectl expose deployment webserver-deployment --type=LoadBalancer --port=80

service/webserver-deployment exposed

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We want our service to expose port 80 from our deployment’s containers behind a load balancer
and this command will achieve just that. Taking a look at our services using kubectl get, we can see
that the service has a type, an internal IP address, and port mappings:

kubectl get services

NAME TYPE CLUSTER-IP EXTERNAL-IP PORT(S) AGE
kubernetes ClusterIP 10.96.0.1 <none> 443/TCP 19h
webserver-deployment LoadBalancer 10.105.244.45 <pending> 80:31133/TCP 2m1s

Since that IP address is internal to the cluster, we can’t actually connect to it. There is no external
IP address because we’re running in a VM, so we’ll need to take one Minikube-specific step to figure
out how to connect to this service. Run this command to get the URL for our service:

$ minikube service webserver-deployment --url

http://192.168.99.101:31133

Your URL will be different, but if you paste that value into your web browser you should be met by
the default Nginx index page. This has been a bit of a whirlwind tour, but I hope you’ve enjoyed
taking your first steps with Kubernetes.

Learning More About Kubernetes

Minikube is a great tool for just getting started with Kubernetes, but if you want to start using
Kubernetes in a production environment, then you likely have a lot to learn. Thankfully, we have
some great courses around using container technologies like Docker and Kubernetes that can get
you up to speed in no time. I’d encourage you to check these courses:
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Kubernetes Quick Start (https://linuxacademy.com/linux/training/course/name/kubernetes-

quick-start?
utm_source=website&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=2019_kubernetesbasics)
Kubernetes Essentials (https://linuxacademy.com/linux/training/course/name/kubernetes-
essentials?
utm_source=website&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=2019_kubernetesbasics)
Essential Container Concepts
(https://linuxacademy.com/linux/training/course/name/essential-container-concepts?
utm_source=website&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=2019_kubernetesbasics)
Learn Microservices by Doing
(https://linuxacademy.com/devops/training/course/name/learn-microservices-by-doing?
utm_source=website&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=2019_kubernetesbasics)
Kubernetes the Hard Way
(https://linuxacademy.com/linux/training/course/name/kubernetes-the-hard-way?
utm_source=website&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=2019_kubernetesbasics)

If you’re looking for the learning path way to reach a particular goal, take a look at these: Learning
Docker (https://linuxacademy.com/linux/training/learningpath/name/learning-docker?
utm_source=website&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=2019_kubernetesbasics), Getting
Started in Containers for the Absolute Beginner
(https://linuxacademy.com/linux/training/learningpath/name/getting-started-in-containers-for-
the-absolute-beginner?
utm_source=website&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=2019_kubernetesbasics), Getting
Started with Kubernetes (https://linuxacademy.com/linux/training/learningpath/name/getting-
started-with-kubernetes?

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utm_source=website&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=2019_kubernetesbasics), or
Kubernetes Orchestration and Management
(https://linuxacademy.com/linux/training/learningpath/name/kubernetes-orchestration-and-
management?
utm_source=website&utm_medium=blog&utm_campaign=2019_kubernetesbasics)

Good luck and happy learning!

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